Evaluation in the Involvement in Teaching Service, Scholarship, or Community should focus on the instructor's contributions to the broader teaching community, both on and off campus:

• Teaching related presentations at KU or elsewhere.
• Attending or organizing teaching institutes.
• Serving as a guest teacher at other institutions, for outside associations, or in the community.
• Developing course materials, such as textbooks or websites.
• Applying for and receiving grants in support of teaching or publishing articles related to teaching.
• Participating in outreach to local schools (K–12) or other forums.
• Mentoring new faculty members in their role as a teacher.
• Coordinating courses within a program or developing a new course.
• Supporting teaching at the unit level by developing new materials for general use; creating infrastructure for labs, studios, or field work; seeking grant support for teaching; recruiting students.

Developmental and Self-Reflective

• The TEF is the foundational component of the comprehensive Developing and Evaluating Teaching Toolkit. The toolkit includes a recommended process for annual review, options for goal setting, and tools for measuring teaching effectiveness. The recommended process for developing and evaluating teaching incorporates the TEF as a starting point for annual goal setting.
• The TEF is designed to be developmental and self-reflective; it is not intended to be used as a stand-alone evaluative tool but rather as a resource for goal setting and reflection within an iterative process for annual review.
• Meaningful measures of teaching must separate the impact of the instructor from the many other factors that affect the attainment of educational outcomes. Teaching is a developmental process that takes time, experience, reflection, and support; the TEF is intended to be used as a supportive and self-reflective tool to improve teaching effectiveness and student success.

Teaching is evaluated at the University of Oregon for a variety of reasons, including for promotion and tenure, contract renewal, and assignment of merit raises. Because these applications are so important to faculty members and the university, evaluation instruments and processes must be as equitable and transparent as possible.

Members of the UO community will be familiar with research on bias inflecting teaching evaluation, particularly the student evaluation of teaching. To mitigate bias and ensure that evaluation supports the development of UO’s teaching culture, the University of Oregon, led by the University Senate and Provost’s office, has launched a new Continuous Improvement and Evaluation of Teaching System.

UO's framework for the Continuous Improvement and Evaluation of Teaching aims to more transparently evaluate teaching with 1) a clear definition of teaching quality and 2) evidence from three sources: peers, students, and faculty themselves. The system also captures and honors the process of teaching improvement, core to the ethos of the Teaching Engagement Program.

In these pages, TEP offers guidance and resources for instructors and departments to support the work of teaching evaluation.

The CTB serves as a comprehensive system that helps instructors and administrators know good teaching when they see it.

• The CTB defines six overarching categories of effective teaching behaviors based on extensive analysis of research on teaching and learning: align, include, engage, assess, integrate technology, and reflect.
• For each category we identified specific behaviors instructors can implement and provide suggestions for evidence and artifacts they can collect to document their teaching practices.
• To help instructors develop focused and cohesive narratives, we developed aligned peer observation and student feedback instruments to gather multiple perspectives on their teaching.
• Feedback on teaching gathered with these materials is grounded by a common language that clarifies expectations and makes it easy to compare and contrast feedback from diverse audiences and reflect on professional growth over time.

This is a story about institutional change. The product of that change—a new framework for assessing teaching quality now in use at Appalachian State University—is important, but the process that led to that change is just as important because it's by analyzing change processes that academic leaders can affect change on their campuses. 

In this episode, I talk with Lindsay Masland, interim executive director at the teaching center at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, who not only helped shape the new teaching quality framework at App State but also launched a grant program that has helped multiple departments do some really important work aligning their programs and policies and procedures with the framework.